Ezra Klein: February 14, 2010 - February 20, 2010

Big, encouraging news on health-care reform today: Harry Reid says that Senate Democrats will use the reconciliation process to finish the bill within the next 60 days. I've noticed some confusion about what this means, so some quick context: Reid...

1) Economist Alan Blinder assesses the costs and benefits of the job-creation proposals. 2) Thinking through what a responsible 2020 budget would look like is a bit scary. 3) What Grant Achatz saw at El Bulli. 4) "The evidence presented...

Matt Miller explains how he stopped worrying and learned to distrust debt predictions. As a debt worrywart who devoured one of Pete Peterson's doomsday books on my (first) honeymoon, and who came to Washington to help balance the budget in...

Trying to figure out the politics of this public option revival has been a bit of a strange experience. On the one hand, momentum seems to be building: The letter asking Reid to run the public option through the...

Since the moment seems to have opened back up for idle policy speculation, it's worth saying that it probably makes more sense to put Medicare buy-in into the reconciliation process than the public option. For one thing, the public option...

A sizable portion of the United States Congress wants to fire the Secretary of the Treasury. The Treasury Department itself is overworked and understaffed, with a number of key nominations sitting in limbo even as the agency struggles to handle...

In a recession, two things happen to Medicaid. First, Americans become a lot poorer, so more of them need the program's help: The recession has fueled the greatest influx of Americans onto Medicaid since the earliest days of the public...

"As we’ve made our institutions more meritocratic," David Brooks muses, "their public standing has plummeted. We’ve increased the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society, yet trust in elites has never been lower." Brooks offers...

David Cameron -- who's likely to be the next prime minister of the U.K. -- gives a TED talk on the future of government in an age when technology has empowered individuals and governments are running out of money....

By now, you already know that an anti-tax activist crashed his plane into an IRS building yesterday morning. The local authorities and the White House quickly said that this wasn't terrorism, even though what they meant was that it...

If you're one of the literally tens of people who've been anxiously waiting for the president to sign an executive order forming a fiscal commission with little actual power and a slim likelihood of working, then yesterday was your lucky...

What do people think of this? Helene Hegemann, a seventeen-year-old German writer, has “mixed” (her word) together a best-selling novel titled “Axolotl Roadkill.” According to an article in the Times, Hegemann lifted entire pages from a novel by a lesser...

"Killing the filibuster outright is unwise," commenter Lommilialor writes in response to my earlier post on the subject. "Had we done that before 2000, Social Security would now be privatized and bankrupted and the Bush tax cuts would not be...

Dan Lyons explains that the Internet economy only looks free. In fact, it's just operating off of a new medium of exchange: privacy. What's happening is that our privacy has become a kind of currency. It's what we use...

Speaking of democracy, Kurt Andersen worries we're too large for it to work any longer. The framers worried about democratic government working in a country as large as this one, and it’s possible that we’ve finally reached the unmanageable tipping...

Megan Carpentier's argument in favor of the filibuster sells itself as a filibuster defense that even liberals can love, but actually shows why liberals should want to rid the Senate of the practice as quickly as possible, and why it's...

1) Peter Beinart offers an interesting account of Washington's dysfunctions, but his solutions don't make much sense. 2) Fareed Zakaria thinks the moderates are winning the fight for the Islamic world. 3) Planning a vacation can make you happier for...

Sen. Michael Bennet's effort to revive the public option in the reconciliation process is gaining steam, with almost 20 senators signing on to the idea. Among them are Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer, who are not, shall we say,...

How an idea becomes a product at McDonald's: When I visited his kitchen, Coudreaut made an exquisite endive and poached-pear salad with dried cherries and mustard-seed dressing. Say he wanted to put that salad on the menu. Among his...

There are a lot of different parts to the government. There's the president, the Congress, the Senate, your governor, the general government itself, and much more. But people aren't very keen on making distinctions between them. As you can see...

This one from my paper: Full story here. I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that the structure of the stimulus, and the fact that it all passed at once, has made it hard for the administration to explain what it's...

College Park MD: How is it that small-business jobs are the key to national job growth? Do they really add up? And what constitutes as a small-business job anyway? Ezra Klein: Steve Pearlstein wrote a good article on this a...

What Greg Sargent is hearing tracks roughly with what I'm hearing: The House and Senate are nearing a compromise bill that the president can present at the Blair House Summit. That compromise looks a lot like we expected it to...

"The former governors have formed an informal caucus of their own within the Senate," writes David Broder, "inviting former mayors and state attorneys general to join them. What they have in common is the discipline of coming from jobs...

If you don't send me questions, I'm going to retire from blogging. Maybe I'll find work helping grow a business, helping guide an institution of higher learning or helping run a worthy charitable endeavor....

Andrew Samwick -- a former director of George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers -- thinks the bipartisan support for tax incentives to hire workers just shows that neither side understands what government is good at doing. If the Federal...

Ever wondered whether a city can declare bankruptcy? Just days after becoming controller of financially strapped Harrisburg, Pa., in January, Daniel Miller began uttering an obscure term that baffled most people who had never heard it and chilled those who...

The Department of Health and Human Services has a report (pdf) out this morning detailing the eye-popping premium hikes that insurers in different states have requested (56 percent in Michigan, 23 percent in Maine -- that sort of thing). If...

Yesterday's posts on the stimulus provoked a lot of reader e-mail. One point, in particular, kept coming up: If you divide the bill's spending by the bill's job creation, it doesn't look that good. "What is $800 Billion divided by...

1) Men want to date younger, women want to date older. 2) An old Michael Kelly profile of David Gergen. 3) What's happening to Greece looks an awful lot like an insurance death spiral. 4) Reid doesn't appear to have...

It took him a day or two, but Evan Bayh has finally begun saying why Washington doesn't work, rather than just complaining that it doesn't. Here he is saying that the filibuster should be 55 votes rather than 60, and...

The administration would probably be having an easier time getting unions to sign on to an excise tax compromise if the unions felt that the administration was fighting for them on, well, anything. Instead, card check seems dead, and the...

It becomes more appealing with age. In particular, it appears to be very popular among Wall Street's old guard of retired executives in their 70s and 80s, who're calling for a more ambitious financial regulation package than even Paul Volcker...

As something of a follow-up to the previous post, this Wall Street Journal graphic (look up) is a neat way of conceptualizing the composition of the program and the trends in the spending. Year one focused on the spending...

I've been getting some e-mails from conservative readers saying that, sure, the stimulus created jobs, but they were all public sector, so they don't count. "There were none, or very little, private sector jobs saved or created," writes one...

The big Republican idea to bring down health-care costs is to "let families and businesses buy health insurance across state lines." Jon Chait has some commentary here, but I want to simplify a little bit. Insurance is currently regulated...

The more I watch our political system work -- which looks curiously like everything else looks when it's not working -- the more I think we're eventually going to inflate away a lot of our debt. Or maybe we'll default....

If the Euro is causing Greece all these problems, can't the country just leave the Euro? And if that's too drastic, then, as Martin Feldstein suggests, can't it just take a little break from the Euro? Well, no. Barry Eichengreen...

Jon Stewart's interview with Jenny Sanford is some uncomfortable television. What does Sanford miss from living in the governor's mansion? The prison inmates who cleaned her dogs and tended her rose gardens. They liked doing it, she's pretty sure. The...

It's no secret that I don't have a very high opinion of Evan Bayh. But it's only fair to present the evidence that he's not the poll-driven mediocrity I've presented him as. First, Jon Alter: I'm not sure people realize...

The day-to-day stories on the stimulus are mostly very small and very political. Republicans hypocritically attacking the bill while taking credit for the spending. Conservatives charging that some mayor in some town spent an infinitesimal fraction of the money...

Gerald Seib's column diagnosing the problems of the Senate as being problems of our politics is very good, and echoes my own thinking to an almost scary degree. As he says, the "broader political system, more than the filibuster, is...

Howard Fineman delivers some real talk on Mitch McConnell: The blizzard had paralyzed Washington. So it was an apt day for a chat (by phone) with Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican who is working successfully—yet with surprisingly little personal...

Stan Collender pushes back on the idea that the government should spend in preparation for freak events rather than historical averages: In the immediate aftermath of last week’s blizzard, many were saying that the governments needed to buy more...

1) "If you’ve ever fantasized about what would happen if the people who helped create the global financial crisis started getting serially murdered, you should give this book a go." 2) The anatomy of the tea parties. 3) "The Senate...

You've probably heard a lot about the Senate jobs bill. First, it was an $80 billion bill written by Max Baucus. Then, Harry Reid tossed that out as too diffuse and vowed to push a leaner $15 billion package...

Andrew Ross Sorkin had an interesting report today on some lawsuits meant to hold the ratings agencies responsible for the securities that they branded safe and that turned out to be dangerous. The plaintiffs argued that the rating agencies, rather...

My impression of Evan Bayh was that he was a major deficit hypocrite. Despite spending all his time talking about the need to reduce spending, he'd voted for all the major spending increases in recent years. When I looked...

Michael Bennett is a moderate Democratic senator from Colorado. Kirsten Gillibrand was a moderate Democrat in the House until she was appointed to fill Hillary Clinton's Senate seat. Neither is the sort of politician you'd expect to be out front...

Robert Pear reports that it's in danger. House Democrats never liked the tax, unions always hated it, and neither group is feeling like taking a hit right now. On the other hand, most agree that the health-care reform process is...

"Ironing out the policy particulars [of the health-care bill] is not a real obstacle," sighs one tired Senate aide. "We were pretty much there before Massachusetts. We pretty much had an agreement. We know where we’ll end up. The...

According to a few new analyses, you can expect home prices to remain pretty depressed over the next few years. The process that begins with a homeowner falling behind on payments and ends with someone else buying the house...

The Daily Yonder has a set of great maps up comparing different diet behaviors (fast food spending, soda drinking, meat consumption and so on) with obesity. The most interesting, perhaps, is the map showing fruit and vegetable consumption. To...

I don't know what it says that I didn't manage to break the news of my Newsweek column, but I can at least confirm the reports: Newsweek has hired me as a biweekly columnist. I'll also be writing longer features...

One of the ways to think about the difficulties facing the legislative process is that the most important player in congressional elections doesn't have a vote in Congress. Here's political scientist Alan Abramovitz. This brings up the most important...

John Judis recalls how regulations were assessed in the Bush years: Bush stopped weighing the costs and benefits of deregulation and issued an executive order allowing OIRA to intercede before agencies made their initial proposals, thereby providing industry lobbyists with...

I think I've said quite enough on the question of whether health-care insurance reduces the risk of death. But one of the first things I did when looking into the subject was call Stan Dorn, the author of the Urban...

1) The future-bailouts-of-America club. 2) Center for American Progress president John Podesta thinks the American system of governance "sucks." 3) People trust government more when the economy is good, and less when the economy is bad. 4) The 43 most...

Elizabeth Warren thinks a "huge wave of mortgage failures on commercial real estate" are going to rip through community banks next year, dealing a serious blow to the economic recovery we've begun to feel comfortable predicting. Community banks are more...

Paul Krugman is annoyed by efforts to suggest that the problems of Greece, Spain and other small countries in the Eurozone's weak economic alliance are simply the result of fiscal profligacy: The truth is that lack of fiscal discipline isn’t...

The Anthem Blue Cross saga appears to have a happy ending: After criticism from the administration, the insurer has delayed the planned 40 percent rate hike. That will give the company time to reevaluate whether it's worth the blow-back,...

The basic problem bedeviling deficit reduction is that the actual proposals to cut the deficit are unpopular with voters in the next election even though the potential effects of cutting the deficit may be popular with voters in elections that...

As the dysfunctions of our political system have become a more prevalent theme on this blog, I've gotten a large number of requests for a series exploring the political systems of other countries. How England runs its health-care system...

Wondering what Indiana Democrats will do now that they don't have Evan Bayh to kick them around anymore? Well, it's a bit complicated. What's interesting about Bayh's decision isn't just that Bayh doesn't seem to want to hold his seat...

One further comment on the skepticism that some have adopted on whether health insurance coverage saves lives: This is not a skepticism consistent with either their actions or their professed beliefs. For one thing, all involved have good health-care insurance...

They think so: The emerging strategy seeks to take advantage of the partisan stalemate in Congress over Obama's nominees and major policy initiatives, and to turn the page on a year when the White House failed to secure passage...

On Friday, I posted about the guest list for the White House's health-care summit, but I missed the big news in the accompanying invitation (mostly because I didn't notice that there was an accompanying invitation). Here's the money bit:...

The politicization of the nomination process is usually understood as an obstacle to the president's ability to hire people. In reality, it may be doing even more damage to his ability to fire people. And that's not something members...